Puzzle Rooms: Time Machine

Prague, Jul 2015

This review was written more than a year after we played it. Whilst we’re confident it’s accurate, it’s short and light on details.

Toby says:

We made a point of playing this room because the concept sounded fun – the team split in different time zones, co-operating to find a way to re-unite and escape. (The operators described it that way to us before we booked, so I’m not counting that as a spoiler.)

I’ve since played several other rooms that start with a split team, and there’s a clear lesson: Don’t force the players to communicate by one-way walkie-talkie. It’s just too frustrating, doubly so if that’s also the means for the operators to give hints. Time Machine suffered from this problem, and after a while we found it was far easier to simply shout through the walls, which was a far superior way to communicate but undermined the theme rather.

Other than that, there was an attempt to match the style of the puzzles to the time zone they were in, which was nice; but overall it was fairly middle-of-the-road.

Sam disagrees:

A great room for teamwork, some of the puzzles were frustrating but overall strong theme and enjoyable. Yes, the walkie talkies didn’t work brilliantly, but this was the first time we had done remote solving between two rooms and I very much enjoyed it.

Seriously impressive. Wish we had been pre-warned the unlikelihood of 2 newbies escaping. Issues with understanding the clue “accent” it Lost us valuable time. Otherwise we would’ve given higher rating

Steve, our GM, did an excellent job of introducing the game with deadpan humour. The theme here is a spaceship in the far future, and at first glance the setting looks the part. On closer inspection, however, the high-tech screens are actually just backlit posters, and most of the puzzles involve finding a code and then putting it into a padlock. There are a few more high-tech puzzles and some nice touches, but if you're expecting something 'next generation' this room isn't it.

What it does demonstrate is that it's possible to create a great-looking and immersive room, while also having lots of padlocks. If you hate padlocks stay away, but if you don't mind them, this room offers a lot of content for even a fairly experienced team. We played as a pair, I think 3 players would also be ok, any more and it would start getting a little cramped as the physical spaces were not especially large. Also be warned there is some crawling around.

Where this room really shines is in the humour - there were loads of little humorous touches and several laugh-out-loud moments, as well as a few tense moments. Let's just say you will need to do a little bit of performance as well as just solving puzzles.

Some great props and fun puzzles, small space as a group and did find as a 4 quite linear so had some time standing around waiting for other people to do things. One of the better London games though and would recommend if looking to play games centrally and already done the Escape Plan rooms.